Death as a Doorway to Bliss
“You must awaken while in this body, for everything exists in it: Resurrect in this life.” — The Gnostic Gospel of Philip
What if we viewed death as the greatest journey we could ever go on while still living?
What if we looked at the fear that arises just before we face a death as a marker for the greatest bliss we are about to experience?
And I’m not taking about letting go of an old pair of shoes, I’m talking about the big deaths, the ones where it is so painful to release an old version of yourself, of the story of who you were, the kind of death where you are terrified to release your grasp on what you know.
Those are the deaths that when you fully surrender to what that wise and steady part of you has known all along, when you finally release your grasp, that the joy and bliss and aliveness comes. The rebirth. The Phoenix rising from the ashes. The resurrection.
Looking back at some of the biggest deaths of my life — the ending to my 7+ year relationship with the person I thought I would spend my life with, leaving my 6 figure job to start basically from zero, and countless equally as terrifying deaths where it was just me on my living room floor dying to some old version of me, the outcome has always been, in the end, the most profound and exhilarating experience of my life. They have all been initations into more life, more of me, more ecstasy and aliveness.
Now in that first example, the 7+ year relationship, I held onto that death process with everything I had. I did not have the relationship then that I have with death now. I didn’t and couldn’t see the gift it was, and I did not reach the rebirth for a long long time.
I’ve had an interesting relationship with death the past few years (my Sun is conjunct Persephone after all) and I have countless eerie stories of death, especially in that first year when death was really initiating me. I was able to see how much fear I held around death. How much I wanted to avoid it at all costs. Ignore it, turn away from it, pretend it wasn’t part of life.
But death is part of life, a beautiful and necessary part of life.
If we can surrender to it while we’re still living, it is actually one of the most beautiful, ecstatic experiences we could ever encounter.
It’s a constant process, dying to those old versions of us, releasing the tight grip of the ego, and our fears will always be there, we are human after all, but if we can start to see them as these tiny little indicators of the joy and potential that is to come, then we may be able to lean in with slightly more curiosity, compassion and an open heart towards the bliss held in terrifying unknown.
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